Summer of Fire Part 19

Today he'd been chasing a report that the h.e.l.lroaring had killed over a hundred elk. Shad Dugan had flown the area earlier and neither he nor Steve had seen any dead animals.

Although it was past six, Steve heard over his radio that the air war to save West Yellowstone was still in full swing. A few hours ago Garrett Anderson had told him there was only a twenty-five percent chance of saving the town.

The wind picked up. Steve smelled fresh smoke, a distinction he recognized between the scent of charred forest and one burning actively. He swore and headed for his truck. Hoping the product of government maintenance and a hundred-thirty thousand hard miles would start, he made plans for a hot meal at the Storm Creek Fire Camp, a few miles away inside the northeast entrance.

The burning smell grew stronger.

Steve picked up his pace, limping after hiking for hours on his bad knees. A few hundred yards to the west, a sudden flare indicated ground fire leaping into the treetops. He reached for his radio to notify Fire Command, just as a ragged a.s.semblage of firefighters straggled onto the trail.

Clare recognized Steve despite his fire clothes and hardhat. She raised an arm. As dirty and soot-streaked as she was, he probably didn't know her.

"Our trucks are a half mile west," she called over the rising roar as the fire crowned. She looked at the green government pickup parked behind Steve.

"Let's go," Travis shouted in command.

Steve opened the driver's side door and leaped in. Clare and the soldiers piled into the truck bed. The engine nattered, but failed to turn over.

Clare surged off the tailgate and ran around to the front. Wrestling the hood release, she revealed the oil-stained engine.

"Piece of s.h.i.+t," Steve muttered at her side. He turned, saw her, and said, "You again," in an ironic voice.

Silver gray eyes met hers for the barest second and they both broke off to scan the compartment. He prodded at corroded battery terminals and lifted a cap while Clare stood on tiptoe to jiggle the spark plug wires. It did not escape her that Sergeant Travis sat on his a.s.s in the truck bed.

Steve got behind the wheel and tried again. "We'll have to push-start it."

Without even looking at Travis, Clare ordered the soldiers out. They obeyed in quick unison and put their arms to the rear panels. It was no good, as the fire worked its way down to the road, effectively blocking them from heading back into the burned area for safety.

The impulse to run seized her. It showed on every face as heat reached them.

Steve gripped her arm. "Out of time." He reached for the belt pouch that contained his 'shake and bake.'

Dear G.o.d, not those flimsy things.

Steve pulled out a wad of silver foil.

Just this morning, she had shown the troops the use of their shelters. Now she waved her arms and shouted for them to clear a spot. It seemed impossible that the tiny tents could keep out the wall of flame that raced toward them.

The soldiers spread out uncertainly, shrugging off their packs. Clare wished she could coach each of them through this. Unfortunately, she was forced to dump her pack and begin clearing a place where she might save her own skin.

While she worked, she noticed that Steve was close to her side, his head down as he dug with a shovel he'd pulled from the bed of his pickup.

A sudden gust thinned the smoke. The troops sc.r.a.ped away at anything that could burn. Clare looked at the h.e.l.lroaring and worked faster. Sweat poured down her sides.

A rain of embers caught the dry gra.s.s in a dozen places. She leaped to stamp out one small fire, and then another.

The troops fumbled at their belts for their shelter pouches and shook out the pitifully inadequate looking covers. Silver foil whipped as they struggled to control all four corners.

Steve whirled to put out another spot fire with his shovel. Clare put a hand on his arm. "Here it comes."

She stared at the blazing trees for a moment, transfixed. Then she reached for her shelter.

A look of horror spread over the face of her most enthusiastic pupil. Private Billy Jakes hardly looked older than Devon, with freckles and those blue eyes like her daughter's. The wind enlarged a great rent in his shelter, splitting it down the middle.

Glowing embers fell faster. Burning branches blew into the road. Without stopping to think, Clare tore the shelter from Billy's hands and let it blow away like a billowing sail. She reached for her own and pressed it into his hands.

The fire swept through the treetops a hundred feet away, pillars of orange, red and purple. Searing heat blasted Clare's face and the gra.s.s at her feet burst into flame.

In the same moment, a tongue of flame roiled out of the woods and licked at the foil mounds where the soldiers had already pulled their shelters over them on the ground. Hands that had been reaching to tuck in flaps retracted inside the b.a.l.l.s that looked like baking potatoes wrapped and ready for the oven.

Clare met Steve's eyes. He pulled his tent over his shoulders like a cape and shoved her ahead of him onto the semi-cleared ground, falling half beside and half on top her.

"I wish I had a respirator," she said grimly.

They lay awkwardly, arms and legs b.u.mping and hardhats at odds. The dragon's breath pressed hot foil onto her shoulder and she realized that the h.e.l.lroaring was upon them.

Nearly inaudible above the fire's vacuuming scream, someone in a nearby shelter sobbed. Steve had gone down with his sleeves rolled up and his hands bare. She imagined his knuckles heating as the line of firelight brightened the edges of the tent.

He swore viciously.

Clare placed her hands in leather gloves over his, taking the tapes from him. "I've got this end." His boots held the other.

He jerked his hands inside with what she imagined would be second-degree burns. Cl.u.s.ters of crimson fireflies revealed pinp.r.i.c.k holes in the shelter. Smoke poured under the edge, bringing tears to her eyes. Crazy currents lifted the material and let fire seep into the uncleared gra.s.s.

While Clare held on, Steve repeatedly slapped out small flames, swearing as he burned his hands. Despite gloves, her hands grew hot, especially her left little finger that felt as though she pressed it to an iron.

How could she have become so c.o.c.ky, thinking things were going well? What if Devon were one of the young people here today?

A roll call was in progress. One by one, the troops called their names into the din. Halfway though the alphabet, Sergeant Travis shouted, "Jakes? Sound off, soldier!"

The only reply was a barely audible sob.

h.e.l.lish orange light seeped through the pinholes. "Stay with it!" Clare shouted. "Whatever you do, don't get up and run!"

The roll call broke down as other voices joined in.

"Hold on!"

"Everybody stay put!"

A sudden, shrill cry made Clare think the pain of her fingers was nothing. It went on and on, a scream of such purely distilled agony that she wanted to put her hands over her ears. Her imagination took flight. A shelter had blown free, the wall of flames devouring its occupant.

Or worse, Clare screwed her eyes shut against the image of someone who'd panicked and thrown off their hope of salvation, a lurching, staggering, falling torch.

When the screaming finally stopped, she shook with sobs. Her tears dried instantly in the scorching air.

Despite an incoherent comforting murmur from Steve, it all surged back. Surrounded by the blast furnace bellow of the h.e.l.lroaring, through her closed eyelids, she could still see the glare of fire, both real and remembered. In the Yellowstone wilderness, someone suffered an agonizing fate. In a Houston apartment house, a roof slanted sideways, twisted, and crushed the man on the hose.

In the past weeks, Clare had gone from denying Frank's death, underscored by her refusal to return to a station without him, to anger at being left unscathed at his side. Now that rage rose with the fire's fury. Travis had said this was her fault.

"No!" She'd kicked at the flaming timbers over Frank, drunk on adrenaline and determined not to lose.

But she had. Frank was dead and a soldier's silence spoke more eloquently than a cry.

Her fault.

With arms that ached, she struggled to hold the foil that flapped in a sixty mile-per-hour wind. Her leather gloves blackened and she gritted her teeth against her burning hands. The fire built to crescendo, sounding like a jet squadron taking off from an aircraft carrier. Communication between shelters was now out of the question.

Steve's weight felt solid and Clare was glad she wasn't alone like the rest.

The smoke thickened. Pressed as close as possible to the ground, she struggled for oxygen. Gripping the tapes as hard as she could, she burrowed her face into the dirt, sucking air from the porous, sandy soil.

G.o.d help her, Devon was coming tomorrow and she had to be there. She couldn't die on this remote mountain, when not ten minutes ago life had been fine.

A little voice whispered that Frank had felt that way too.

Steve realized that he must have blacked out, for the shaky breath he took was perceptibly cooler. Once he'd had anesthesia, that same sensation of being here and then . . . being here. His head spun as wildly as on a college drunk, back when he'd seldom imbibed.

Outside, the only sound was the diminished crackle of flames.

The quiet after the agonized cries spiraled him back. The still silence that had fallen after the Triworld jet jerked to a halt had been replaced by a quick whoosh and crackling. For the rest of his life, fire would remind him of the night he'd thrown off his seatbelt, thinking to leap to his feet and pull Susan and Christa to safety. Shocked into immobility, realizing they would never need his protection or love again, he would have remained with them. He'd been saved because two fellow survivors saw his plight, fought him from the fuselage, and restrained him from going back in.

At the height of the h.e.l.lroaring's pa.s.sage, he'd wondered, as he had while the plane fell, if this was it. To live through the crash, bury his family, and die in a worthless shake and bake? His redemption had died with Susan and Christa, but in defiance of his denial, at the height of the firestorm, Clare had murmured something that could only have been a prayer.

She lay beneath him, small and still. He lifted his weight off her with an effort, willing his knees to support him. He lifted his right hand, the one less burned, and touched a pulse in the side of her neck.

She s.h.i.+fted slowly, as though waking from sleep. Through the reek of burning, Steve smelled their mingled sweat.

He'd thought of her on the mountain. How she'd studied him with a steady gaze, as if she saw beyond the sodden wretch that drink had made him. That is, that he'd made of himself.

Her high-boned cheeks and generous mouth; that bronzed skin that invited a man to smooth his hand across it . . .

He rasped her name with a smoke-raw throat. She moaned.

His trembling right knee signaled that it was about to collapse.

Her hands disentangled from the shelter and she turned over beneath him. "We made it," she whispered, her tearing eyes triumphant.

A surge of gladness that they had come through . . . together, made him not sorry that he couldn't hold himself up any longer.

His weight came down, his body covering hers, feeling a tautness in her that sang. He did not believe it was his imagination. For the first time since Susan, he knew the touch of a woman, warm and full length, shocking him with its rotten timing.

"Ten hut!" The troops' leader sounded as though his boots were planted beside their shoulders. He'd been useless when they were trying to start the truck, but now he wanted to play commandant.

Steve threw off the shelter in a swift movement, pushed himself off Clare and leaped to his feet.

The world had changed.

The road was a blackened shadow of the gra.s.sy strip. Dead pines stood with needles burned off, their bare limbs looking naked and somehow obscene. A layer of white ash covered the ground and a charred smell pervaded everything from Steve's clothes to the pores of his skin.

The troops emerged, climbing unsteadily to their feet. Here and there, someone nursed a burned hand or wrist, but the fire shelters appeared to have prevented catastrophe. The only two women in the group appeared from shelters next to each other, while the bantam rooster of a Sergeant stood with his feet apart, his face pointed accusingly at Clare.

She pushed past Steve, searching. Her face was set in grim lines that told him she was ready for anything, from minor burns to full cardiac arrest.

Steve wasn't.

Clare knelt and lifted a soot-blackened silver sheet with sure hands. Steve stepped closer and smelled something worse than a burned-out forest, a sweetish stench of scorched meat.

Bile rose in the back of his throat. That s.h.i.+ny, blackened crust belonged to no race on earth. White, Black, Hispanic, or Native American, there was no clue left. Fire r.e.t.a.r.dant clothing stuck to skin as though it had melted on. One sleeve still smoked.

A look at Clare's face confirmed the man was dead.

The first time she'd seen a dead person, she'd been shocked at how truly gone life was in the instant that light faded from their eyes. They hadn't let her see Frank, but she'd imagined. His hearty energy turned to one more piece of fuel.

Clare felt the letdown start inside her chest and radiate down her arms. It happened whenever she'd been pumping adrenaline for a long time and there was nothing more to be done.

Sometimes it happened watching someone's house collapse on irreplaceable photos, a child's doll, and the memories that would never be the same. Once a family Golden Retriever had been trapped in a laundry room. When intense heat had beaten her back, she'd thought she'd need support to simply hold herself upright. She'd gone on.

After Javier had dragged her away from Frank and into the street, after she'd cried with Pham Nguyen's mother, she'd gone down onto the curb. With her head between her knees, she'd felt lower than the gutter beneath her boots.

Beside the dead soldier, Clare was fiercely grateful she was already on her knees, for she would have fallen. Delayed reaction set in, a deep trembling that replaced the wall of detachment she'd thrown up on approaching the downed man. She was aware of the others standing at a distance, waiting to see what she might do. "There is nothing," she said, then realized she'd merely thought it.

Steve offered the radio he'd worn on his belt. Hers was in her blackened pack.

She stared at the box as though she didn't know what it was. Gradually, her training rea.s.serted and with a shaking hand, she clicked the mike. "Firefighter down," she told the man who answered.

Thank G.o.d it was someone she didn't know, for if she had to talk to Garrett she'd break down in front of Sergeant Travis and the soldiers. "We need emergency medical care and transport for . . . twenty-two. We've got one . . . body."

She realized that she didn't know who had died. It could be any of the soldiers, whether they had called their names before the screaming or not. "We'll have to get back with an ID."

"Christ, who . . .?"

"We've got Joe, Sheila, Mako, Rodriguez . . . "

"Sound off!" Sergeant Travis clipped.

It began as before, proceeding briskly all the way to J.

Private Billy Jakes, who had answered the previous roll call with a sob, did not reply.

"Jakes!" Travis shouted. "You there?"

A low murmur began.

"Jeez, not Billy . . . "

"Sound off, I said."

The rest of the roll continued more slowly, from Lomatewa through Sanchez to Young.